Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  He went up to his room. The prism was no longer in his window, and all his books had been packed. The white linen window curtains and white crinkly bedspread had been sent to the laundress. He looked out at the cove. It was low tide. Some gulls were squawking around the slimy piles. Standing at his window, he felt no curiosity about the absence of the cormorants, just as he felt no curiosity about what his mother, downstairs, was whipping up for dessert. He could ask her when she had seen them last, but he doubted whether she had troubled to keep track of them after he had gone. She liked birds but she was not really interested in them.

  He was curious about something else. He went to the head of the stairway. “Tell me, Mother,” he called out, “did the headmaster know you were going to Europe?” “Yes,” she called back. He did not know why this should be such a body blow, considering everything. He ought to have sensed it was strange that they would let him go home after only eleven days of captivity; he should have asked himself the reason for this mark of favor. Now he knew.

  Four years later, as a hoary ghost going on nineteen, he had amnestied his parents for putting him in boarding-school. Within their limitations, they had been right. If he had stayed at Rocky Port High, he could never have made a halfway good college; he saw that. Of course, it had solved all his mother’s problems to have him in school, but she would not have done it for that motive. Not she. If the offer had come before his father’s visit, she would have fought off the suggestion of boarding-school like a person refusing to listen to temptation. But a temptation was something attractive; that, for Peter, was the sad part. Though his mother had been sorry when he had been carted off, it was because a sort of promise had been broken, and she always hated that. But she regretted it for him, not for herself. As the babbo kept telling him, “You must not forget, your mother has her own life.”

  Yet from his present perspective, he could recognize that his parents had done the natural thing, being what they were. His mother’s departure for Europe and his own departure for school had been on Nature’s schedule for the sub-species they belonged to—white, middle-income intelligentsia. His parents had been responding to a deep instinctual drive of their class, for which he forgave them as individuals, his father somewhat more than his mother. At this late date too, he at last understood why the cormorants had failed to materialize on that February weekend to receive his Hail and Farewell. He was probably right in thinking that he had not seen them since sometime during exam week, toward the end of January. There was a natural explanation. They had simply migrated south when the thermometer dropped and had doubtless been living in New Jersey.

  The Battle of Rocky Port

  PETER’S MOTHER HAD WARNED him that Rocky Port might be different after four years. For that matter, he was different himself, and so was she. Three years ago, in the fall, she had married again—an art historian this time, a Gentile from Massachusetts, a nice guy. He was divorced, with three little kids, who lived mostly with their mother, like Hans’s offspring. Peter had met him in Rome, when he went over that Easter, and guessed immediately that “Bob” would be his new stepfather. Bob had a grant to do a book on Mannerism, and he took Peter and his mother to see a great many churches, which Peter quite liked, to his surprise, for he did not like the word Mannerism. But the churches he liked best, it turned out, were by a madman called Borromini and were Baroque.

  He was resigned to his mother’s marrying, since he was in school. He was not a dog in the manger but more like the fox and the grapes. Now he divided his summers between his parents; his father had finally bought a house on Cape Cod, and his mother and stepfather tended to spend their summers in Europe. Last summer, they had taken a house near Perugia, and Peter had studied for a while at the University, in the school for Stranieri. It had been very hot; the level of the courses had been low, and he would have preferred to be with his father on the Cape. There was not much Nature in Italy; the peasants had shot most of the bird population, and Peter missed the American brooks, ponds, and woods. What he had liked chiefly in Umbria were the black-eyed milk-white oxen, which made him think of Io after she had been turned into a cow.

  “Why can’t we go back to Rocky Port?” he asked every year when summer plans were discussed. His new stepbrothers and stepsister used to copy him. “Why can’t we go to Rocky Port?” Now his demand, so long on file, had suddenly been acceded to, and he knew the reasons. To cushion the blow about Mississippi and to give him a good memory of America, which he could take with him to Europe, where he would be on his own for the first time. His mother had sacrificed her Italian summer to be with him; his stepfather was in Siena for six weeks, working. So that once again he and his mother were alone with her instruments, and he found he was glad.

  This year, they had a car, as well as his motorbike. Their old house had been sold to some middle-class types and painted another color. The “historic” house they were now renting was on the best street, shaded by elms and maples. It had four original fireplaces, a hedge that Peter had to clip, and two bathrooms. In short, like most Americans, except the poor, they had got richer in the interim. To Peter’s slight astonishment, his mother had made a success. She had played behind the Iron Curtain and in India and Japan and South America—everywhere but Africa, just about. Her records were in the college music shop, with her picture on the cover in a low-necked dress, and his roommate, a music addict, had asked him for her autograph. His stepfather, who taught at NYU, was a recognized authority on Mannerism, which had been “in” for several years now. He lectured, authenticated, published, and he was always getting grants and fellowships for research and travel. There was nothing wrong with this that Peter could put his finger on; a society that starved art and artists would not, he guessed, be preferable. His mother was making an effort to live as she had always done—only somewhat better. Except when she was in Europe, she still did her own housework; she would not travel first class, unless the government was paying for it. She mended and sewed and gave lessons, free, to young musicians. She did not mind playing continuo with a group whose work she respected, and every now and then she gave a benefit to help refugees from Franco or for some other worthwhile cause. She was an easy target for composers who dedicated pieces to her, which she then had to perform. Everyone, especially her sister, told her she was doing too much—a thing she liked to hear. In fact, to Peter, who refrained from saying it, both she and Bob seemed tired. He believed her when she said she was looking forward to Rocky Point as a respite from seeing people. This summer, with his help, she was going to be anti-social.

  That ought not to be hard, Peter thought. Right away, of course, they were invited to cocktail parties and they went. His mother said that if you accepted the first invitation and stayed just a short time, people would be satisfied to leave you alone—you had done your duty. Besides, she was curious about the artistic colony Mrs. Curtis had mentioned who were alleged to spend their summers here. But this was one of the changes that had to be expected, apparently. Museum directors, New Yorker contributors, Metropolitan Opera songsters, fashion photographers, makers of woodcuts, food-writers, Reader’s Digest editors were extinct in the area, though their names were still mentioned, as on a village honor roll, like the World War II tablet opposite the Portuguese church. Some, it appeared, had died at an unstated date; others had been divorced or just “gone away.” Those who still owned houses—chiefly Victorian churches that had been turned into studios or dwellings—rented them for high prices and were living in Rome or on a Greek island.

  By contrast, the phantom crew Peter and his mother had met four years ago was still in evidence, more or less intact, beaming on his mother: “Well, hello, Stranger!” Their number had been increased by new recruits. The great change in Rocky Port, it seemed, was the multiplication of what were now known as All-Year-Rounders. “Are you Summer or All-Year-Rounder?” Peter was asked, in no idle tones, as he made his maiden appearance at a Rocky Port function. If you answered “Summer,” he discover
ed, you were supposed to say it with a sigh. The All-Year-Rounders did not welcome summer people, except as proselytes. “Come on, boy, you get your pretty mother to buy some property here. Rocky Port needs you.” “ ‘Uncle Sam needs you.’ ” Peter muttered, lifting an eyebrow. “Maybe they don’t like it here,” a woman suggested, teetering. “What have we got to offer?” “Oh, we like it,” said Peter hurriedly. “But my mother has to be in New York. Because of her music. And my stepfather teaches there.” “You’re never too young to retire and start living,” a man interposed. “Look at me.” Peter looked. The man, though the worse for drink, did not appear to be more than forty; he was wearing a pair of flowered Bermuda shorts. “He used to run a coal-mine,” a deep-voiced woman who ran the bookshop explained to Peter. “Came up here on a yacht and fell in love with the place. Never went back. People here have more leisure to do the things they really enjoy. Cultiver leur jardin. They want to get out of the rat-race.”

  He had never heard this expression actually used before, except by teen-age cynics, but it was common, he found, among the Rocky Port gratin. According to themselves, they were all escaping from the rat-race. “Poor Jack has to go back to the rat-race,” a young woman who used to be a model sighed, of her husband, a lawyer for breakfast foods. Fortunately there was now a regular air service to New York, and a new thruway had been built, cutting the driving time by fifteen minutes.

  Peter was startled to meet this kind of American on the native soil—the kind he had seen in Europe and instinctively disbelieved in: women who said “wee wee” and were on the prowl for “the little girls’ room,” corporation executives with corporations who were either going to vote for Goldwater or considered him “too extreme,” couples with cruisers and sea-skis who were belligerent about “Veet Nam,” couples who announced “We’re three-Martini men, ourselves,” couples who served drinks in glasses marked “Wood Alcohol—Your Poison.” In Europe, his mother used to say that this kind of American was manufactured for export only; you never saw them at home. But here they were in Rocky Port, assembled for shipping. “My husband and I spend every winter in Positano.” It was his first contact, he realized, with the American bourgeoisie in situ.

  “Stay away from them. They’re Birchers,” a voice hissed in his ear at his second cocktail party. It was Mrs. Curtis, tapping on his elbow, to detach him from an elderly couple he had just been introduced to. “Sorry?” “Birchers,” she repeated impatiently. “The John Birch Society.” “Oh.” He stared at the harmless-looking pair who had been offering to bring him together with their granddaughter; they lived in the house on the water where the apple tree had blossomed—he had been going to tell them about it, in case they didn’t know. “Is there really a branch of John Birch here?” he whispered, to Mrs. Curtis; he had pictured them mostly out West, like bad men in a movie, wearing Stetson hats. “Ha ha,” she answered darkly, shaking her small round head with its white Dutch bangs. “Where do they meet?” “No one knows. They’re underground.” Inwardly, Peter scoffed. He did not want to believe in a hidden network of reactionaries; that was McCarthyism in reverse, he felt. “But if they’re underground, how can you be sure who is or who isn’t a member? I mean, do you have any evidence, Mrs. Curtis? Those people I was talking to, they didn’t sound like crackpots. Maybe they’re just regular Republicans.” “They have their private atom shelter. Stocked with French wines. At the bottom of their garden.” She nodded her white head, with determination, three times. After this, Peter was ashamed that whenever he saw the elderly couple, arm in arm, approaching, he crossed to the other side of the street.

  Having seen the lay of the land socially, his mother decided that they ought to take expeditions, get to know the geography better. She went to the county seat and bought a surveyor’s map, which she turned over to Peter. The first thing they were going to do was find the waterfall again and swim in the pool at its foot; she loved icy water. But the map, Peter discovered, though printed last year, was already an historical curio: The new highway construction had altered everything; the map bore only a dreamlike relation to the bulldozed countryside. Road numbers had changed, and the old Indian trail, which he had counted on to get his bearings, had melted into the thruway. He could see the waterfall distinctly in his mind’s eye. You followed the Indian trail, which was a secondary road, to the edge of a state forest; then you turned left, going by a lake or a reservoir, till you got to the glen. There the road became impassable, but you saw blue blazes painted on trees and leading into the woods. You parked and started hiking. He remembered the spot exactly; a jay had flashed by. Eventually you came to a slippery walk with a rusty iron railing that led up to the waterfall. Beside the dark pool at its bottom there had been an overturned blue canoe. But now, with the roads changed and leaves on the trees, everything looked different. New little houses had toadstooled; they passed a trailer camp. They drove about in circles, misled by landmarks that appeared to be familiar. They stopped to listen, thinking they heard the sound of rapids. They argued. Peter suggested climbing a tree, as in the jungle. Finally his mother said they must give up and ask Mrs. Curtis if she still had the map Peter had marked. But Mrs. Curtis had junked her old maps when the thruway approached; like many elderly people, she was a new broom. The cobwebs were in her memory. She had no recollection of a waterfall up in that neck of the woods. “You must mean Pierce’s Mills. There’s an old milldam there, with a falls. Used to be a cheese factory too.” “We’ve seen Pierce’s Mills,” his mother said. “That’s a village, Ellen. This is a forest.” “You don’t mean the old granite quarry?” His mother looked at Peter. Why remind Mrs. Curtis that it was she who had told them about the waterfall in the first place?

  They tried again, twice more. They found a Boy Scout camp on a lake; they found a reservoir. They found a remote village called Green’s Falls. But the glen was lost. The waterfall was lost. His mother kept stopping the car at every crossroads and asking, but no one could help her.

  She took the loss of the waterfall harder than the owl’s death or the absence of the cormorants. After all, she said, waterfalls did not die or migrate in the normal course of Nature. She felt it as a deliberate blow at her sanity. To console her, Peter suggested blueberrying. Back in the Free Library, he had been reading the old state guidebook, done by the WPA before he was born, and been amused by descriptions of the roadside flower-stands tended by farm wives and of happy urchins selling blueberries from house to house. The flower-stands were no more, but there must still be blueberries in the thin, second-growth woods. In the stores, you could buy only big tasteless cultivated blueberries shipped from Maine. Instead of just setting out on their own with pails and saucepans, his mother had to inquire where the best blueberry patches were. They were in copperhead country, she was told. She would not go and she would not let Peter go either. He accepted her veto, just as he had accepted the veto on Mississippi, having pondered the problem of the rights of parents. Until he was twenty-one, his life did not belong to him; he was in debt for it to his parents. He did not have the right to risk it without their consent, as long as they were reasonable. If he died at nineteen from a copperhead bite, he would feel awful for his mother, especially since the babbo would say it was her fault. And the fact that he would be dead and not able to stand up for her would make him more reprehensible. Anyway, blueberrying without her would not have been much fun.

  In recompense, they picked water lilies from a slightly noisome pond. Peter watched baseball games on the village diamond. One day, they drove across the state border to an herb farm, where she bought herbal teas and plants of perfumed mints and geraniums to put in their window boxes and where they saw a hummingbird and a lot of goldfinches. Another day, picking pink mallows in the marshes, they saw a flight of Snowy Egrets or immature Little Blue Herons—without his field glasses, he could not be sure which.

  Summer had brought to light a beach club and a golf course. There was a drive on to put them up for membership in the club. Four
years ago, Peter could never have made it, because the board had been “stuffy” about Jews. “Nobody named Levi would have even been considered. No matter who your mother was.” “The Virgin Mary was a Levi,” Peter remarked stiffly. It irritated him to have to listen to briefings about discrimination, which inevitably had a smug tone, whether the speaker was for excluding Jews or not. “Really? Isn’t that fascinating? I must make a note of that. Just in case some of the old fogeys try to blackball you.” But that, it seemed, was unlikely, if they had the right sponsors; the club had been integrating. Last year a lovely Jewish family had finally been accepted and were able to swim and play tennis there, though of course they had their own tennis court and their own heated swimming pool, thermostatically controlled, which they had built before they had been let in. The club had come “a long way” in a very short time; only two years ago, a Jewish boy, brought as a guest, had been asked to leave the dance floor by the club president. “Is the same guy still president?” Peter wanted to know. Well, in fact, yes; Rome was not built in a day. But Peter and his mother would not have to worry if they brought Jewish house guests for a swim; no one would say a word. The club might be a bore for his mother, but it would be Peter’s chance to get to know the young people. There were dances every Saturday night and movies on Wednesday. Peter could swim and play tennis and perhaps even sail, if some of the youngsters with boats would take him on as crew. Thursday was barbecue night; his mother might like to bring steaks or hamburgers and cook out on the beach over the communal fire with the others, which would smooth Peter’s path …

  Peter’s interest in this proposition was nil. There was a perfectly good public beach down at the point. Every evening, just before sunset, he and his mother swam there; he would dive from the raft with his former classmates, most of whom were working in a war plant, having been deferred by the Army. From the raft, he could watch the natives—who were not the same as the All-Year-Rounders—assemble in their cars to watch the sun set. Then he and his mother would drive home, wrapped in beach towels, to change. He would light a fire and pour them each a glass of sherry. At such times, he was happy.